El Camino Hospital had a problem: Patient falls were increasing, according to Chief Nursing Officer Cheryl Reinking. "We take pride in high quality,” Reinking said at the Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum on Tuesday. "That was very concerning to us."

So El Camino, put advanced analytics to work tackling the serious patient safety issue. Effective fall prevention comes down to keeping tabs on different variables, of course. A hospital needs to know its patients, and which ones are at higher risk. El Camino performs and documents a fall risk assessment in its Epic electronic health record.

Some strategies are lower-tech: yellow slippers, for instance, to identify the patients at highest risk. But clearly there was more technology could do. So El Camino partnered with Qventus, based in next-door Los Altos, California, to put machine learning to work improving the problem.